“as a staff, we joke that every single episode of our show has the same crypto-theme. And the crypto-theme is: 'I thought this one thing was going to happen and something else happened instead.' And the thing is, we need this. We need these moments of surprise and reversal and wrongness to make these stories work.”

[Ira Glass]

Ever wondered what that sign is for? Sometimes we do wonder about things, yet we don't ask and pretend we know (unless we're among friends) for fear of looking stupid.

To be wrong in public is the ultimate source of shame. Yet it is human to make mistakes, said Seneca the Young (attributed), persisting is where the devil comes in. An example that the devil is in the details. Aristotle provided some clarity in the Ethics by writing that to do something wrong and not feel shame is a sign of wickedness.

Isaac Asimov was a prolific American author and a professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. He believed in the relativity of right and wrong.

In an essay, Asimov said, “‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are absolute; that everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.” Instead, he says, “it seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts,” and that certain ideas can be true in a sense, but still in need of further correction with new information.

When there's nothing at stake, we're not so bent on being right. But in most instances, it's more fun being right because being wrong has consequences, it exposes us. However, when we get past that instinct and dislike, we open the door to discovery and learning.

Journalist Kathryn Schulz says:

Granted it is easy at least comparatively to find pleasure in error when there's nothing at stake. But that can't be the whole story since all of us have been known to throw tantrums over totally trivial mistakes. What makes illusions different is that for the most part we enter in them by consent. We might not know exactly how we are going to err but we know that the error is coming and we say yes to the experience anyways.

In a sense much the same thing could be said of life in general. We can't know where your next error lurks or what form it will take but we can be very sure that it is waiting for us. With illusions we look forward to this encounter since whatever minor price we paid in pride is handily outweighed by curiosity at first and by pleasure afterward. The same will not always true when we venture past these simple perceptual failures to more complex and consequential mistakes. But nor is willing the embrace of error always beyond us. In fact this might be the most important thing that illusions can teach us: that is is possible at least some of the time to find in being wrong a deeper satisfaction then we would have found being right.

Her goal with Being Wrong is “to foster an intimacy with our own fallibility, to expand our vocabulary for and interest in talking about our mistakes, and to linger for a while inside the normally elusive and ephemeral experience of being wrong.”

To err is to wander and wandering is the way we discover the world and lost in thought it is the also the way we discover ourselves. Being right might be gratifying but in the end it is static a mere statement. Being wrong is hard and humbling and sometimes even dangerous but in the end it is a journey and a story. Who really wants to stay at home and be right when you can don your armor spring up on your steed and go forth to explore the world True you might get lost along get stranded in a swamp have a scare at the edge of a cliff thieves might steal your gold brigands might imprison you in a cave sorcerers might turn you into a toad but what of what To fuck up is to find adventure: it is in the spirit that this book is written.

Our relationship with certainty is complicated; it's not just about rational thinking, but involves our emotions and impacts our identity. So we prefer to tell ourselves a story that is more consistent with our view of the world, or current actions. For a radical example, Schulz says:

Albert Speer minister of armaments and war production during the Third Reich close friend to Adolf Hitler and highest-ranking Nazi official to ever express remorse for his actions. In his memoir Inside the Third Reich Speer candidly addressed his failure to look for evidence of what was happening around him.

“I did not query a friend who told him not to visit Auschwitz I did not query Himmler I did not query Hitler,” he wrote. “I did not speak with personal friends. I did not investigate for I did not want to know what was happening there... for fear of discovering something which might have made me turn away from my course. I had closed my eyes.”

We all tend to give more weight to evidence that confirms our beliefs, even if it's just on the surface. But knowing the name of something is not the same as knowing it, which means we should not stop at the surface, but learn to go deep. Seeking evidence that both proves and disproves our hypotheses is a way to move in the direction of knowing what is going on, and potentially discovering even bigger ideas.

Says Schulz:

If you really want to be right (or at least improve the odds of being right), you have to start by acknowledging your fallibility, deliberately seeking out your mistakes, and figuring out what caused you to make them.

This truth has long been recognized in domains where being right is not just a zingy little ego boost but a matter of real urgency: in transportation, industrial design, food and drug safety, nuclear energy, and so forth. When they are at their best, such domains have a productive obsession with error. They try to imagine every possible reason a mistake could occur, they prevent as many of them as possible, and they conduct exhaustive postmortems on the ones that slip through. By embracing error as inevitable, these industries are better able to anticipate mistakes, prevent them, and respond appropriately when those prevention efforts fail.

In this evidence-free environment where judgment and opinion rule the day, what is certain becomes comfort food for the mind. The more ego drives, the more our sense of self becomes fragile and in need of protection and being right is culturally associated with being worthy:

In our collective imagination, error is associated not just with shame and stupidity but also with ignorance, indolence, psychopathology, and moral degeneracy. This set of associations was nicely summed up by the Italian cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, who noted that we err because of (among other things) “inattention, distraction, lack of interest, poor preparation, genuine stupidity, timidity, braggadocio, emotional imbalance,…ideological, racial, social or chauvinistic prejudices, as well as aggressive or prevaricatory instincts.” In this rather despairing view—and it is the common one—our errors are evidence of our gravest social, intellectual, and moral failings.

Rather than doing the work to understand issues, or uncovering our learning opportunities, the most interesting manifestation of internal insecurity is a public display of aggression. Survival instinct is also part of it, and it may be for this reason that our minds tend to discard the instances in which we were wrong or made mistakes.

Instead of having a meta-category, we have many different definitions for our errors. Says Schulz:

We file them under a range of headings—“embarrassing moments,” “lessons I’ve learned,” “stuff I used to believe”—but very seldom does an event live inside us with the simple designation “wrong.”

This is an attempt of our personal culture to diffuse by blunting words rather than acknowledging gaps. The more we identify our sense of self and identity with our minds, the stronger our desire to minimize and forget those errors. Yet as Seneca said, making mistakes is all too human. We are creatures who try things, and as part of having experiences, we are wrong. It is not us who are the error.

For 34 years, Cathy had a complicated relationship with food, mom, work, and love. Her public conversations gave voice to its readership’s family, professional, and social concerns and preoccupations. The comic strip's creator, advertising industry executive Cathy Guisewite, created a prototype of the character to placate her mother and was surprised when it hit a nerve.

Universal Press Syndicate agreed to sign her up on her first submission because the character met an unfulfilled need, giving voice to the daily struggles of a large part of its readership. From the start, the daily comic strip addressed very personal issues women face. Between 1976 and 1980 Guisewite was undaunted by the steep learning curve and the grueling work of holding down a full time job and figuring out how to deliver the strip ready for production.

Due to the personal nature of the story line, a woman going through her week, Guisewite ended up naming the character after herself. Along with clarity of identity, the first shift from drawing for herself to drawing for her audience required some mastery of technique. At the time the technology for drawing cartoons for publication was using a pen to trace ink on Bristol board.

The strip became popular quickly and in the second year of her producing it, someone at the syndicate got interested in merchandising. Universal Licensing was built based on her enthusiasm for doing merchandise and they tried things including T-shirts, coffee mugs, greeting cards, and calendars. But once the business grew, Guisewite started handling it herself, growing a staff to 8 people as licensing company Guisewite Studios.

And that's when she learned a lesson many business people learn as they start chasing the market, rather than providing a service or product they believe in, that comes from their “why.” She says:

and that is, the farther you get from the truth of what it is that you do—in my case, me with a blank piece of paper and pen—I think that the messages were the clearest, the art was the cleanest, the designs were the simplest when it was just me.

I think the farther I got from that, the worse the products looked, the less connected to the essential message, the less well things did. And I got more disconnected, anyway. After many, many years of trying that, I got in the position of having to sign up new licensees to get enough money to support the company that existed.

So I wound up agreeing to put Cathy on things in ways that I really didn’t like, but I thought, “Oh well, we need the money, we’ve got to do that.” When you get in that situation, it’s not good.

To make things right for audiences and customers, we need to stay true to why we're doing something, this is what directs value. Clarity of message comes from clarity of identity, consistency of experience comes from mastery of technique.

Nearly three thousand people subscribe to Conversation Agent by daily email. If that's you, thank you for choosing that option. The current format was offered a while back by FeedBurner and is now unsupported by Google. So while it's not going away, the formatting is not ideal for readability. I don't like not having control, it doesn't allow me to serve you better.

Because I also read a lot of what's important by email, I understand the importance of a good layout. So I'm planning more options for people who prefer a similar experience to reading directly on the blog.

So if you subscribe by email, stay with it. That is not going away (as offered by the old FeedBurner). But in coming weeks we will offer a better daily reading option. We'll give you the heads up if you'd prefer that option.

Many readers also prefer to catch up on weekends.

Weekly digest option

Maybe you're not aware that in addition to conversations and tools on business, technology, behavior / social cognition, and other sciences Learning Habit is also a weekly digest of articles that appear here. It goes out weekly on Sunday morning.

This digest is about offering a point of view on mainstream conversations around topics that touch close to home to help us listen, reflect, and figure out where we net out on the issues, how they impact us, lessons we can draw, and so on.

Tools to practice

For people who are interested in pragmatic applications of what they have been reading here, it's a good time to be us. We can draw more enjoyment with less pain from speaking in public, for example, in addition to getting out point across.

Imagine if there were ways to increase personal value, so we can make an even bigger difference in the world, use our energy to time things better rather than get frustrated with little results, and become the best version of ourselves.

Our operating system is the brain and how we interact with the world are the apps. Often, we do a lot of work at app level—so productivity, efficiencies, learning new tactics, buying shiny new objects, you name it. This approach doesn't work to evolve our operating system. We need to work at the operating system level. When we do that, then we have the ability to achieve smarter aims.

Achieving SMARTER Aims(TM) is the focus, and that's where we'll be learning how to do that.

When Bill followed up with me to talk about it, we discovered how our work intersects in how we both use conversation and interviews. But I have a stronger focus on offering tools and principles to “take control” at the operating system level. And here's why ― because the alternative is we let others take control and reprogram us ― or worse, our ignorance lulls us into a false sense of security (we think we know and we stop looking for better answers).

This is important. The more things change, the more taking control matters. But how do we go about remaining authentic to who we are, working from a place of strength, as we work to design the life we want? How do we not become “all cheesy in asking,” (as someone recently said)?

We do it through clarity and purpose. That's how we attract the people, ideas, and opportunities we need to make an impact. So if this interests you, if you'd like to learn how to use conversation as a tool to help get more of what you want (and stay away from what you don't want), sign up now.

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I had a conversation with a business owner recently, and he asked me, “how do we get noticed in the noise?” We all know intuitively that shouting doesn't work so well, even as we're tempted to do it out of frustration.

Maybe you asked versions of the same question. they look like this:

“How do we build rapport quickly?”

“What can we do to know who to trust?”

“How do I get better results?”

“How do I get a better deal when I'm in no position to negotiate?”

“How do we have meaningful conversations when there is no time?”

Here I'm going to flip the script on a prevalent metaphor we use, that of time is money. Exactly. So if we want to make money, we make time.

If something matters to us we figure it out. When we take the time to practice, to link our physical experience with the story in our head, then what happens is we improve, we increase our value, and then we matter. That's how it works.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos shares tips about his management style and philosophy with a crowd at the 2016 Pathfinder Awards at the Museum of Flight in Seattle#. The interview is by Steve Taylor, chief pilot for Boeing Flight Services.

During the conversation, Bezos says that based on his observations, people who are right a lot, listen a lot. And they are also open to changing their mind. He says:

They seek to disconfirm their most profoundly-held convictions, which is very unnatural for humans. Humans, as we go about life, we are mostly very selective in the evidence we let seep into us. We like to observe the evidence that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. People who are right a lot work very hard to do that unnatural thing of trying to disconfirm their beliefs.

[...]

the world is complicated. Sometimes you get new data, and when you get new data, you have to change your mind. But sometimes you also don’t get new data and you just re-analyze the situation, and you realize it was more complicated than you initially thought it was, and you change your mind.

[...]

Anybody who doesn’t change their mind a lot is dramatically underestimating the complexity of the world we live in.

Given the nature of business innovation, experimenting needs to be part of it. We don't know exactly where we'll net out, but we need to be willing to engage with trial and error. As children, we have no problem learning that way, stay open to opportunities, but as adults we get attached to our expertise.

To share ideas, we should explain them in essay format. Amazon is known for its memo writing practice. Says Bezos:

The great thing about English language memos is they have verbs and sentences and topic sentences and complete paragraphs — this is harder for the author [to put together], but it also forces the author to clarify their own thinking. It totally revolutionized the way we do meetings at Amazon and it’s been very, very helpful to us. I would recommend it to anyone.

Internal meetings at Amazon start with everyone in the room spending up to 45 minutes reading in silence as they digest detailed documents known as “narratives.” The practice of internalizing narrated information helps individuals make mental summaries of the topics, and discourages listening only for facts.

If we think back at times when we felt energized and inspired at a networking event, or some other kind of gathering, when we walked away feeling great, that we connected with someone, we experienced what a good conversation looks like. Why can't all of our interactions be like that?

For that to happen, we don't need to talk more, we need to talk better.

Can we save conversation?

When high school teacher Pam Barwell set out to teach students how to speak on a specific topic without relying on notes he was in a for a surprise. He says:

“I came to realize that conversational competence might be the single most overlooked skill we fail to teach. Kids spend hours each day engaging with ideas and each other through screens, but rarely do they have an opportunity to hone their interpersonal communications skills.

It might sound like a funny question, but we have to ask ourselves: Is there any 21st-century skill more important than being able to sustain coherent, confident conversation?”

Speaking in public is not the same as elaborating thought in our heads, or editing an email we're preparing to send. It requires a whole different set of skills and lots, lots of practice.

What does that look like? For starters, we should aim to enter conversation with the thought that we'll learn something, so engaging with curiosity is helpful. Which also means we should be open to be surprised. There are many good reasons why disagreement is central to progress, it gets us out of our comfort zone. Innovation is all about stepping outside complacency, or the way we've always looked at something.

The interview is a great format to try―providing we are flexible and keep an open mind to follow the conversation where it goes. When we're interviewing someone, the idea is to draw information, knowledge, and stories out, not to prove we're smarter. The fact we're part of the conversation is invitation enough.

Practicing better conversation

Radio host Celeste Headlee has worked in public radio since 1999, as a reporter, host and correspondent. Like Terry Gross of Fresh Air, she has practiced her skills through listening and asking questions. Headlee also holds multiple degrees in music and still performs as a professional opera singer.

1. No multitasking ― “Don't think about your argument you had with your boss. Don't think about what you're going to have for dinner.”

Be present and in the moment, or use the law of two feet and walk away if you feel you can't contribute or don't want to be there. This one is hard because research shows the delta between speaking speed and thought speed means when we listen to the average speaker, we're using only 25% of our mental capacity. We still have 75% to do something else with.

2. No pontificating ― “If you want to state your opinion without any opportunity for response or argument or push back or growth, write a blog.”

A point well taken and worth thinking about as we comment on and share information online. Here we could practice keeping something in draft format, then reading it as if we were on the receiving end of it. There's tremendous upside when we put ourselves on hold.

Headlee says, “The famed therapist M. Scott Peck said that true listening requires a setting aside of oneself. And sometimes that means setting aside your personal opinion. He said that sensing this acceptance, the speaker will become less and less vulnerable and more and more likely to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener. Again, assume that you have something to learn.”

A good rule of thumb is also to ask simple questions, especially in the beginning of a conversation. It helps both parties ease into it. For example, when we talk to customers, or colleagues, we want them to be more descriptive. Which means staying away from questions that elicit only a yes/no response.

“Try asking them things like, 'What was that like?' 'How did that feel?' Because then they might have to stop for a moment and think about it, and you're going to get a much more interesting response.”

4. Go with the flow ―“That means thoughts will come into your mind and you need to let them go out of your mind.”

This also needs practice. Because we can all think of times when we've been talking with someone, they're telling us about something that happened to them, and we want to jump in and add our story to theirs... often before they're even done. It's harder to do when we're on the phone, or on a podcast or radio program, and we don't have visibility into body language to learn if they were done.

5. Admit when we don't know ―“people on the radio, especially on NPR, are much more aware that they're going on the record, and so they're more careful about what they claim to be an expert in and what they claim to know for sure.”

What would happen to our conversations if we thought they were being recorded and we were on record? Talk doesn't have to be cheap. And in that vein, when so much of our talk is in the form of text and online commentary... well, it's worth putting some care into it.

6. No equating your experience with theirs ―“It's not the same. It is never the same. All experiences are individual.”

We're all guilty of this. When a topic touches on experiences we've also had, we want to jump in. Say a death in the family, or a rough situation at work.

Says Headlee, “You don't need to take that moment to prove how amazing you are or how much you've suffered. Somebody asked Stephen Hawking once what his IQ was, and he said, I have no idea. People who brag about their IQs are losers.”

7. Try not to repeat yourself ―“It's condescending, and it's really boring, and we tend to do it a lot.”

Instead, we might want to practice saying things better next time, if we have the impression our point is not coming across. Fair enough?

8. Stay out of the weeds ―“Frankly, people don't care about the years, the names, the dates, all those details that you're struggling to come up with in your mind. They don't care. What they care about is you.”

Context matters. We should be mindful of the circumstances in which we have the conversation It's an acquired skill for those of us who love diving into the details of things. But there is a time for every purpose, and that is where we have the opportunity to get better at being appropriate to the task at hand.

We could be starting with things we have in common, for example.

9. Listen ―“This is not the last one, but it is the most important one.”

Although most of us acknowledge the importance of listening to improve our understanding, learn new things, and enjoy new experiences, when it comes to the actual doing, we fall short. This is probably because nobody teaches us how to listen explicitly. Here are some ideas on how to listen, for a change.

We can start practicing by shifting our focus on being interested rather than being interesting.

10. Be brief―we should aim to be organize our writing and thoughts so they are complete, but on the safe side of fluff.

Anyone with a podcast or radio show would do well to check out Celeste Headlee's Heard Mentality.

There's a good tool we can use when we want to connect—conversation. When we see it as dialogue, conversation is shared inquiry. But it's really hard to pull off this kind of back and forth dance between talking, suspending judgement, and listening online.

More often than not, what we see online is discussion, which reflects the tendency to think alone. In a discussion, people see themselves as separate from each other. Just like with email. We think it's a conversation as a phone call would be, but it's no such thing. Email is more like an informal letter we lop over the fence (sometimes uninvited).

Conversation is a process of mutual making sense, in real time.

In a recent interview about Captain Fantastic, which was out this past summer, Danish-American actor Viggo Mortesen talks about tapping into childhood memories and our inability to join conversations in real time.

He says:

Sometimes people bring up stuff and you go, [grimaces]. And it’s like, “Well, obviously, it’s about this, and you guys are saying this,” or, “Matt, obviously, you were thinking this.” And a lot of times, because he’s an honest guy, he goes, “No, it hadn’t occurred to me.” Anyway, so that’s great and it’s a good feeling.

But it doesn’t happen all the time that people come up and honestly say, “I want to talk about the movie, and I’m relating to it.” It just doesn’t happen that often. And also, that’s the way the country is anymore. I mean, it’s very polarized. It’s not just the politicians: It’s they’re tapping into something, a disquiet, a polarization.

People aren’t communicating well. You know, they’re getting lots of information with other devices to reinforce their existing position and prejudices, but they’re not reaching out to really interact with other people. It’s been a couple of decades since I’ve seen it this bad in this country and I think this movie, without dealing with that issue directly, speaks to the problem of not communicating, of not listening to others, of cutting yourself off.

A comment is: a note explaining, illustrating, or criticizing the meaning of a writing; an observation or remark expressing an opinion or attitude; a judgment expressed indirectly.

Conversation is: oral exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas; an informal discussion of an issue by representatives of governments, institutions, or groups; or simply an exchange.

Comments are not the same as conversation. They're easier, reactions are easier still, as in fave, like, retweet... and so on.

Scanning news or link titles leaves us with unprocessed fragments and words. It takes time to form an opinion and work to hold one within our values, and it starts by having the conversation with our selves.

The other side of complexity is not reaction. That would be simplistic. Simplicity requites awareness, knowledge of the issues, honesty, sincerity, and the desire to help tease out what we can help clarify. We need to go through having the conversation to come out better on the other side.

Making choices requires a clear understanding of who and what creates value. When we focus on process, we're less busy being right, or getting our way, and more invested in what's happening with our feelings, our body, and our mind. Rather that getting stuck on positions, we delve into understanding issues. Along with engaging our curiosity, this type of process makes the work much more enjoyable.

“Is this a test Pam? Are you requiring proof of how badly I wanna make you happy so that we can create this beautiful thing together?”

The line comes after a challenge by Mary Poppins' P.L. Travers to Walt Disney in 1964. That was the time, Disney had invited Travers to engage with his team in the making of Mary Poppins the movie. Travers had just told Walt, as he liked everyone to call him, “I understand your predicament Mr Disney, I do. I just —hm— I don't know what it is, I'm just suddenly very anti-red. I shan't be wearing it ever again.”

Saving Mr. Banks writers Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith get across Disney's sheer enthusiasm and love for setting the imagination on fire and keep it alive throughout the story. A visit to the Disney Park is an opportunity to witness the main voices in their conversation —as Travers reminisces about her past, Walt engages with the present enjoyment of park guests.

In Be Our Guest, The Disney Institute captures Walt Disney's obsession with providing an environment that delivered the highest quality experience. His philosophy was to think about customers' needs in all circumstances and interactions, getting the fundamentals right:

“From our earliest days, education has been a hallmark of our company. It was Walt himself who said, “We have always tried to be guided by the basic idea that, in the discovery of knowledge, there is great entertainment—as, conversely, in all good entertainment, there is always some grain of wisdom, humanity, or enlightenment to be gained.”

When creating a setting design for one of the parks, Disney Imagineers go by “Mickey's Ten Commandments,” which are in line with challenging limiting frames:

1. Know your audience ―Before creating a setting, obtain a firm understanding of who will be using it.

2. Wear your guest's shoes ―Never forget the human factor. Evaluate your setting from the customer's perspective by experiencing it as a customer.

3. Organize the flow of people and ideas ―Think of a setting as a story and tell the story in a sequenced, organized way. Build the same order and logic into the design of customer movement.

4. Create a "WIENIE" ― Borrowed from the slang of silent-film business, a wienie was what Walt Disney called a visual magnet or landmark used to orient customers.

5. Communicate with visual literacy ―Language is not always comprised of words. Use color, shape, and form to communicate through setting.

7. Tell one story at the time ―Mixing multiple stories in a setting is confusing. Create one setting for each big idea.

8. Avoid contradictions, maintain identity ― Every detail and every setting should support and further your organization identity and mission.

9. For every ounce of treatment provide a ton of treat ―Give your customers the highest value.

10. Keep it up ―Never get complacent and always maintain your setting.

Which is where the magic comes in:

"Think for a moment about a magic show. To the audience, the show elicits feelings of wonder and surprise. Most of those watching have no idea how the magician is creating the effects they are witnessing on the stage. Not knowing how an illusion is created and simply enjoying the show are a big part of the fun. The magician's perspective is completely different. To the magician, a magic show is a highly practical task, a series of repeatable steps designed to create a fixed result and delight the audience.

The same thing happens at Walt Disney World and in all other companies that create magical customer experiences. The happy surprise that a well-served customer feels is a result of hard work on the part of the company and its employees. For the customer, the magic is a source of wonder and enjoyment. For the company and its employees, magic is a much more practical matter."

In business we're always asking what solves the problem. It's much easier to dial into it when we make it personal. It helps us show up and create accountability for solving it. Say we go back to the start and ask—what’s the simplest way to tell someone what the problem is? That’s the problem.

If we can tell simply, then we can put ourselves in the audience and see how we would go about looking for a solution, and what that internal conversation would be. When we make it personal, we look for things we would find interesting. We want to be more accurate and specific. Because we are vested in the perspective we seek to create a solution.

It's useful to be aware that our personal biases may cut both ways. There's a relationship between perspective and power, and when we don't know what's being measured, we need to devise a way to find out what's our instinct. Do we describe the problem so someone else could see it in the proper proportion to their needs? Or do we describe it to make it easier for us to act on it, to deliver a solution?

Which is our default? Do we take our own perspective, or do we take someone else's? Asking this simple question is one method to stay on purpose and work on the right things - both what to say, and how to go about delivering the appropriate solution.

Dan Pink says:

in general, not all the time, there is an inverse relationship between feelings of power and perspective-taking. The more powerful one feels, the worse, typically, their perspective-taking abilities become. High-status people, in organizations and society are typically not good perspective-taking people. The low-status people, they're usually great at it; they're not in control.

[...]

if you gradually lose the ability to see the world through someone else's eyes, all the experience and expertise you have accumulated will melt into a puddle of unrealized potential.

But if you work to balance power and perspective-taking (you'll have to work at that, it won't come automatically), you'll become a more effective leader because you will offer reasons beyond “I said so” for why anybody should follow you.

It also helps to gather the facts and to have a framework that will put them in the proper proportion.

Take for example the trend accelerated by startups, many in the tech sector, that increased the number of remote workers. It started with functions like programming or engineering as a way to outsource the function temporarily, then permanently and also to find the most specific and/or skilled individuals, no matter where they lived.

Remote or virtual workers are real people with skills who do not show up at a central office or location every day. The fear is with a loose workforce we lose the common culture. Does it outweigh the benefit of gaining access to a much wider pool of talent?

37Signals, now Bootcamp and Campfire and Highrise is a known example of working as a distributed team successfully. The team's understanding of the challenge helped them design a better product for companies that operate through collaboration.

A simple illustration of how power and perspective interact with proportions is how we look at geographical references.

I used this slide during my Digital Age 2.0 talk in Sao Paulo, Brazil to demonstrate how in the Americas we view the world. This is what we see when we buy a map in the U.S.

This is the map I grew up with in our school walls and geography books. It's more familiar to me and fellow Europeans, and likely it scales to show our country of origin in zoom. Because that is what we focus on. I'm willing to bet that countries in Asia Pacific have their own version.

Which one is accurate?

Interestingly, none of them. It turns out that the mapping method to transfer a spherical form to a flat dimension distorts proportions. By going back to the start, we can ask what’s the simplest way to tell someone what the problem is?

That is the problem. In this case, it's about translating a spherical form onto a rectangular surface accurately. We need a method to transfer the representation and keep its proportions intact. Then we can each look at it from different perspectives. Why not 3D? Technology makes that achievable today.

Keio University Graduate School of Media and Governance + AuthaGraph CO., Ltd Hajime Narukawa Beagle Science Corp. Tetsuya Hoshi did just that [via].

As the 2016 Good Design Award winner entry describes:

this original mapping method can transfer a spherical surface to a rectangular surface such as a map of the world while maintaining correctly proportions in areas*. AuthaGraph faithfully represents all oceans, continents including the neglected Antarctica. These fit within a rectangular frame with no interruptions. The map can be tessellated without visible seams. Thus the AuthaGraphic world map provides an advanced precise perspective of our planet.

It would be inaccurate to say that our maps are the territory. Geography means earth description, it's a field of science. From Wikipedia, “geographers study the space and the temporal database distribution of phenomena, processes, and features as well as the interaction of humans and their environment.”

The maps are the work of cartographers. From Wikipedia, cartography means, “combining science, aesthetics, and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality can be modeled in ways that communicate communicate spatial information effectively.”

Here at Conversation Agent, we love books. And we believe that to learn the most when reading, we want to be in conversation with the author. We should subject what we read to inquiry. Not to agree or disagree, but to take control of what we think about the material based on where we are in our journey of knowledge and experience.

As Umberto Eco' says through a conversation between Adso and William in The Name of the Rose, many hypotheses, false though they may be, can still lead one to a correct solution:

“The only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from the insane passion for the truth.”

[...]

“Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.”

When we listen to the anatomy of what happens to our body and mind when in conversation with an author, we have many tools at our disposal to engage. For example, our intuition, which comes from the cumulative experience and working intelligence, tells us if the material is sincere. How we feel about it is an open invitation to be curious as to why. This is what learning is about.

If something doesn't feel genuine, we know it right away. Because it has no heart. So while what an article, book, or talk says may be in the ballpark of interesting and useful, it slips away when we try to have a conversation with it. We should pay attention to this feeling and inquire further, rather than try to talk ourselves into accepting what everyone else says.

How else are we supposed to ask others to believe us when we're not ready to believe ourselves? Coherence is an earned trait. It comes with practice, and we practice by listening to and developing what is core to us —our values and purpose— then experiencing ideas and stories “with an unobstructed mind,” as Bruce Lee would say. Lee created a 'no style' form of martial arts to not get trapped into a method, confined as individual.

Conversation is the 'no style' form of training we can use to create options for ourselves —as the circumstances of our work and lives change constantly. It's a process that happens at many levels and that is what we want to train so we can deal with information, data, and experiences in different contexts. We have enough documented history behind us to know that things that are considered true one day, are thrown out the next. So our compass needs us to provide the setting.

History teaches us that the answer is not to ban or censor thought, but rather to encourage self-knowledge beyond knowledge, what Eco referred to as the antilibrary. We want to engage in the conversation with thought and do the work necessary to figure things out as we go along living our lives and doing our work. Right and wrong are not absolutes, even in science, certainty is relative, there's a stark distinction between knowing something and certainty.

Delegating thinking or assimilating the ideas of someone else, or as often is the case, many others, does not a full picture make ― it most likely makes a Franken-pastiche. With the added discomfort of still not knowing what we think. So this is the nature of permission, to allow ourselves to be exposed to ideas while doing the work to develop and practice our core.

We have approximate answers and possible beliefs, but the best way to see them through is to keep practicing their development. Which control would we rather have, that of our thoughts and choices, or an alternative? It's useful to seek evidence of where imagination has led our collective history, and the consequences of fencing thought in.

Books feed the soul, but also help the mind practice. Why our library should contain all kinds of books and ideas. Marcus Zusak's Liesel, The Book Thief, can't resist books. A story with heart. He says:

“I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn't already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race-that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.”

What is right “for us” to us right this moment matters. This is where responsibility and accountability come in. Which is why we want access to raw data ―our experience and the ideas and the stories based on the experience of others― not to agree and disagree, but to have the conversation.

There are many forms of censorship, but thought is quite hard to fence in. A recent example of it is in the form of permission slip a father wrote to address censorship taking place at his son’s book club. His son Milo is in 8th grade [via].

Milo's note to his parents says:

Dear Mom + Dad,

My ELA book club and I are going to be reading Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. The book is set in a dystopian future where books are highly illegal, and it is the man carachter’s [sic] job to burn them.

This book was challenge because of it’s [sic] theme of the illegality and censorship of books. One book people got most angry about was the burning of the bible. Secondly, there is a large amount of cursing and profanity in the book.

-Milo

If you are cool with me reading this book, sign here.

Milo's father, Daniel Randosh, responded:

I love this letter! What a wonderful way to introduce students to the theme of Fahrenheit 451 that books are so dangerous that the institutions of society – schools and parents – might be willing to team up against children to prevent them from reading one.

It’s easy enough to read the book and say, ‘This is crazy. It could never really happen,’ but pretending to present students are the start with what seems like a totally reasonable ‘first step’ is a really immersive way to teach them how insidious censorship can be.

I’m sure that when the book club is over and the students realise the true intent of this letter they’ll be shocked at how many of them accepted it as an actual permission slip.

In addition, Milo’s concern that allowing me to add to this note will make him stand out as a troublemaker really brings home why most of the characters find it easier to accept the world they live in rather than challenge it.

I assured him that his teacher would have his back.

Because, “History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power —bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favors to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community,” as Umberto Eco says, we do want to learn from history.

Case study is an expression marketers and sales professionals borrowed from science. As such, there are at least four types to serve different purposes:

1./ illustrative are primarily descriptive to make the unfamiliar familiar and to give readers a common language about the topic in question;

2./ exploratory or pilot are condensed case studies performed before implementing a large scale investigation. Their basic function is to help identify questions and select types of measurement prior to the main investigation, but we should be careful to test our assumptions about conclusions;

3./ cumulative serve the purpose of not incurring additional expenses when enough information already exists in past studies. Pulling information collected at different times allows us to generalize with a certain degree of accuracy;

4./ critical instance serve the purpose of examining a situation of unique interest to answer cause and effect questions.

When we talk about case studies in marketing, what we mean is simpler, although getting to the results takes work. We mean telling the story of how we progressed through solving a problem or identifying an opportunity and delivering results.

They work best when the narrator is the customer and the story is in their own words. But we can help gather the right information to be relevant to our audience.

The structure of a case study varies slightly, depending on its use. However generally there is one way to construct the flow:

(1.) protagonist — this is the audience, the people we would like to attract

(2.) situation or challenge — this is what happened, the problem that needed solving with specific detail about the kind of loss, discomfort, or challenges it created, including how it made the person feel. We want to be specific in our description in this part of the story. Including the detail will help other people relate to the issue and help us set the stage for providing the measurable part of the outcome.

For example, we needed to improve sales is not as good a description as we needed to increase sales in the Western region by 2x. If this is a customer experience or business issue, what needed fixing? Increasing customer retention from 78% to 89%, or product output by 7%.

(3.) finds a person or company— this is us and the type of problems we solve and opportunities we help create

(4.) who comes up with a response or solution — from a marketing standpoint, the solution is the plan, how the company proposes to go from where we are to where we want to be.

For example, a small business needs to go from making cold calls or generating leads manually to creating a flywheel of qualified inbound leads. Or a large organization wants to go from siloed groups working in parallel paths to a high performing integrated team thatpractices agility of thinking and execution.

(5.) protagonist is called to action— in hero's journey terms, this is the decision making point

(6.) life without following the advice — this is what it would look like if the problem persisted or the opportunity was never realized. There is a point in the hero's journey when a decision means staying in the ordinary world, or stepping into the special world. When we decide not to cross the threshold to the special world, we are pulled back into the refusal of the call.

(*) time line or complication — a nice addition to the story at this point when we need to provide some context and dimension to a case study. This is where we can go on record by putting events in a proper order to indicate dependencies and movement. Who did what when and where. Complication is language that comes straight from McKinsey & Co.

(7.) life following the advice, or results — leads were up by 2x, a cross-functional team handles twice the workload in half the time generating $$$ more revenue, the company is able to transact much more business online and faster thanks to greater server capacity, customer retention is at 90% and life in a high performing environment is less stressful for everyone.

We can use different formats to tell the story. Video conversations are the most captivating because we're drawn to narrative and other people. It's always a good idea to have a transcript, and an audio version, along with a short description of the main points of the story, the action steps, and the results using the customer language as much as possible.

Captioning the video is helpful as well, because sometimes we want to watch something without the sounds on not to disturb colleagues working in the same pace, for example.

Soliciting information for case studies

For video shoots, it's helpful to have a conversation with the customer and take hem through the flow ahead of time, then script the story. The script actually helps us be more spontaneous in the telling, because we know what we want to cover and the parts. We'll transcribe the actual video shoot.

How do we identify case study candidates? When we get results and have a close working relationship, asking is much easier.

But say we're a larger organization with multiple brands, we want to pay attention to customer reviews and social shares, then reach out as appropriate. In general, anything posted in public forums and social networks is considered public domain, but asking is a good idea and can help us uncover other areas of opportunity, or make the story even better by having the conversation that follows our flow.

Companies that engage customer communities have a much better chance of learning how they can help create better experiences by identifying problems or potential issues and helping solve them. We're in business to help people get more of what they want and need. Those are usually the best case studies.

Many companies require business and legal approval to release case studies. In some instances when we cannot get permission to use a company name, we can name the industry and remove some of the identifiable information from the story.

Case studies are a perfect medium for B2B

Case studies are very appropriate for businesses that sell to other businesses. That's because often purchases are made by groups or require several approvals, and the format of a case study presents a concrete and quantified narrative of a company's problem solving abilities and success.

Businesses that serve other businesses tend to occupy niche or narrow markets, which is actually a very good thing. Because the more specific the story the better. This is also why companies that serve other businesses have the opportunity to tell their story to customers regularly through a blog or a series of videos by subject matter experts.

Engineers like to engage with others just like them, they can publish to maintain their professional visibility and to network ideas with peers. Scientists who work outside the pressure of academic publication also love to engage with other scientists.

There is a mechanism at work here, which is about identifying areas of relevancy among customers and prospects, building community, and allowing others to amplify our influence as we meet their needs.

Our customers do want us to tell them our story.

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This is a topic in my talk on influence where I covered mostly the external aspects of connecting with the network effects of building community. But there is much more to this conversation than meets the eye (or the time allotted for the talk.) If you're curious about mastering the language of influence when it comes to customer engagement, drop me a note.